easy-speak Guide Take control of your Toastmasters journey!

Transcription

1 easy-speak Guide Take control of your Toastmasters journey! f

2 Table of Contents Introduction... 1 Registration... 2 Confirming & Amending your attendance... 3 Signing-up for roles... 4 Requesting Speeches... 5 Measuring your progress & Goal setting... 7 Meeting Management... 8 Introduction Most Toastmasters clubs in the United Kingdom use easy-speak to manage their meetings, keep track of member s progress and schedule speeches and roles. This system is also known as D71 or toastmasterclub.org Knowing how to use your club toastmasterclub.org website well will enables you to take ownership of your Toastmasters journey by using the following tools: Confirming attendance to meetings weeks in advance Signing-up for available roles directly on each meeting page Requesting speeches several weeks in advance Tracking your Competent Leadership progress Please read this guide thoroughly and familiarise yourself with its contents. With it easy-speak becomes really easy! 1

3 Registration You will be given a username to use to log into the website as soon as you join a club as a member. This will be ed to you with the subject line Welcome to the Toastmasters automation site. Your username will typically contain part of your name or family name, but it could also be initials. It is worth remembering that you can modify it later if your wish. For the purpose of this guide we ll be Victoria Brown. Victoria has recently joined London Victorians Toastmasters in London and is keen to get going! Click on profile and you will be prompted for the log in details you have just been ed and you will be sent to the profile page where you can change your password. Each of the tabs circled in yellow in the image enables you to do several things. Personal: You can change your details such as your name, contact phone numbers, occupation and address here. Several privacy settings are available, ranging from making your information public, to showing it to club members or to officers only. The default privacy setting is club officers only. Preferences: Timezone settings and language settings can be modified here. Communication: Links to LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter profiles can be added here. Images: Want to add a picture to your profile? This is the place! 2

4 Toastmasters: A recap of clubs where you are a member and of your recent speeches. It might be useful the next time you log back in to click remember me so that you don t have to input your password again. Once you are signed in you will be presented with the page below. In order to access more options you will need to click on the London Victorians link on the left hand side. Confirming & Amending your attendance The first page you will reach upon clicking London Victorians will be showing several things but the most pre-eminent of them will be the agenda of the next meeting. The fields circled in green allow you to confirm your attendance. Clicking on the green thumbs-up confirms your attendance and the red thumbs-down signals that you are not coming. It is also possible to use the boxes under the confirm attendance column. Clicking the circle to the right of Y signals that you are coming, the one to the right of N that you are not coming. You can also say that you might come by clicking next to the question mark. Clicking Previous or Next will move you to the agendas of the following or previous meetings where you can perform the same operations. Typically a week to ten days before a meeting, you will receive an automated by our Vice President Education if you have not already confirmed your attendance. This contains links enabling you to inform us if you will be able to attend the meeting or not. 3

5 It is very important that you communicate your attendance to club meetings and that you give as much notice as possible if you are unable to attend. This way you won t receive automated reminder s or be chased up by a member of the committee. Giving plenty of notice allows roles to be rescheduled, so kindly bear that in mind. Signing-up for roles It is possible to sign up for roles on the website several weeks in advance of meetings, by clicking on the sign up for roles menu on the left hand side, in the My Participation tab. You should typically be able to sign up for roles at least three meetings ahead but this could be as many as five meetings in advance. As per club rules, remember that you should strive to do two roles between doing prepared speeches. To sign up for a role, simply click on the green thumbs up button displayed beside each role. Be aware that signing up for a role at a meeting, automatically confirms your attendance at this meeting. If for any reason you are unable to attend this meeting, please notify us as soon as you can by changing your attendance on the system. Should you wish not to sign up for roles on the system, you may be assigned roles by the Vice- President Education if you have confirmed that you are able to attend a meeting. An will be sent to you at some point, notifying you of your role and offering you the possibility to accept or to reject the role. 4

6 A final way to sign-up for roles is to look at the agenda of any meeting and to click on the green thumbs-up button of the available role you wish to take. Requesting Speeches Requesting speeches works in a similar way to role requests, as you need to click on the request a speech link of the My Participation menu. Doing so will open a new popup windows, containing three tabs, Speech Title, Workbook/Speech and Preferred Dates. You only need to write in your speech title in the first tab, but you do not need to do so right there and then. You can always add your speech title later as we will see. 5

7 If the Vice-President Education has not done so already, you must select the Competent Communicator as the workbook in which you will be working on. Alternatively, if you are an advanced speaker, please select the title of the workbook that applies to you. You will need to express your first, second and third preferred dates in the last tab. Whenever possible, we will endeavour to accommodate your first preference, but should it not be possible we may have to reschedule your speech to your second or third preferred dates. Once this process is completed, the Vice-President Education will be notified by and will schedule your speech accordingly. Should you need to add or amend the title of your speech before a meeting, you can do so by clicking on the pencil circled in green below which will pop up the Speech Title tab. You can additionally formally accept the role of speaker for that speech by clicking on the green thumbs-up button. 6

8 Measuring your progress & Goal setting There are a further two links on the My Participation tab, called View my Speech Progress and View my CL progress. The first link will open a page enabling you to see your progress on the communication track, recalling the titles and dates of your previous speeches. The second link will open up a similar page focused on your leadership progress. Completed competent leadership manual projects, will be highlighted in green. Consider setting yourself goals on both the speaking and leadership fronts. Goals can be set by the buttons circled in green and can be as varied as completing five speeches by end 2015 or completing my competent communicator manual by June By setting yourself goals, you are taking ownership of your Toastmasters journey and helping us as committee members to support you in achieving them. Be proactive, set yourself goals! 7

9 Meeting Management If you volunteer to become Toastmaster of the meeting in some clubs, you may be asked to help the Vice-President Education in managing the meeting. This will be a great opportunity for you to improve your facilitation skills. With easy-speak you ll have plenty of tools at your disposal to ensure that all roles are filled-in. You can access the meeting you ll be Toastmastering at any time via the My Participation tab an then clicking on Meeting on (Date) circled which will open-up a drop-down menu of options. Click on View Meeting here circled in red and this will bring you to the meeting page. By virtue of being meeting manager you will have access to extra privileges on the meeting page. One of which in a detailed attendance page which will tell you who s coming and who s not coming. It looks similar to what ve seen before in Confirming & Amending your Attendance. Except that you are now able to track the attendance of all club s members at the meeting. While members should update their attendance status themselves, you can if you wish manually update someone s attendance yourself. The row of dates circled in green shows when someone last attended a club meeting. You can switch to the Show # of Roles view instead which will show you how many roles members are doing at the meeting. This is a good way to find out if someone isn t doing a role at a meeting. You can switch back to the previous view by clicking on Show Last Attended. Some information regarding the meeting you re managing will be ed to you automatically via notifications. 8

10 These notifications like the one shown above cover the following: Someone taking up a role at the meeting. A speaker or functionary has cancelled his/her attendance to the meeting. Someone marked unsure to attend being assigned a role. You can assign roles to members attending the meeting very easily by going onto the Sign up for Roles screen shown below. Select the member you wish to assign a role to from the drop-down menu and the role will be allocated to the member. 9

11 When assigning roles in a meeting remember to follow these guidelines: Bear in mind the experience level of the member in question. Try not to assign a junior evaluator to a more advanced speaker. Prioritise members attending who haven t attended in a while. All roles require prior preparation especially Table Topics Master or speech Evaluator. You have the possibility of sending an automated to anyone you ve assigned a role to. Click on the tab at the upper right corner of a meeting page circled in green below. The first and the second s will typically be sent out by the Vice-President Education. But do assist him/her by sending out the third when you re assigning roles to someone. Combine sending out meeting s with asking members individually to help out if needed or by sing your club s WhatsApp group. It is often the case that individual approaches are better than mass or group approaches when requesting assistance. Most importantly, remember to be proactive when helping organise a meeting as Toastmaster, leaving things to the last minute is very often a bad idea! 10